“The Famous and the Obscure Were There, Waiting for Freedom”: Jeeva Rajgopaul's Photographs of South African Exiles in New York, 1991

ABSTRACT

In photographing South African exiles living in New York City in 1991, Jeevenundhan (Jeeva) Rajgopaul intended to counter the apartheid state's propaganda maligning exiles as “terrorists”. Today, his photographs—as records of subsumed, intersecting socio-political experiences—are also an unintentional project in corrective history, invaluable to audiences within and outside South Africa. In documenting exiles who were regarded as those who played “lesser” roles in South Africa's heroic story of liberation, Rajgopaul's intimate portraits form powerful presences that help counter a long history of erasures in South Africa. Rajgopaul repurposed traditional mandates of social documentary photography in South Africa, which were, in the decade leading up to the 1990s, focused on using the visual language of “spectacular violence” in order to depict the everyday brutalities of living under apartheid. His depictions of the ordinary and the day-to-day in exiles’ lives provide rare insights into the ways in which individual experiences of exile were influenced by race, class, educational levels, social support systems in the new location, and level of affiliation to political parties-in-exile. Together, Rajgopaul's photographs and the narratives that exiles shared with him evidence the ways in which heroic national memory—and the nation-state's reliance on creating singular (often patriarchal) heroic figures—is dependent on the erasure of contributions from those who are less convenient, and the “other” histories their experiences evidence. By focusing attention on those whose stories and experiences remain largely uncelebrated, Rajgopaul's photographs trouble and enrich existing image and narrative repertoires about South African exiles’ experiences, and complicate the uplifting, redemptive arc of the popular version of the liberation narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• Afrapix
• exile
• social documentary photography
• apartheid
• South Africa

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Funding

This work was supported by Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program.